The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound

by Michael North

Michael North offers a subtle reading of the issues by linking aesthetic modernism with an attempt in all these writers to resolve basic contradictions in modern liberalism. Though Yeats, Eliot, and Pound certainly attempted to resolve in art problems that could not be resolved in actuality, their very attempt resulted in a politicized aesthetic, one that confessed their inability to do so. The book includes accounts of the specific political activities of the three writers, reinterpretations of their critical theories in light of their politics, and rereadings of some of their major works, including The Tower, The Waste Land, and Pisan Cantos.

241 pages, Hardcover

First published January 31, 1992

About the author

Michael North is a Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature, The Final Sculpture: Public Monuments and Modern Poets, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, and Henry Green and the Writing of His Generation, as well as many articles on various aspects of twentieth-century literature.

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

While perhaps a little dense and repetitive, this is a scholarly work with a single organizing thesis, and thus it is best to forgive. It alternates between biographical/ historical, theoretical, and poetic-close reading sections, all of which find a psychological grappling with the political exigencies of the time in the poets. (Does this sound exhausting? That's fair.)
The interesting thing, for the author and probably for most of us readers, is how much similarity one can find in the views of the three men, despite the radically different roads they took from those views. "In each case, the isolation of the individual, the tensions of class division, and the apparent separation of poetry from the world of practical politics, are all salved by a political aesthetic in which the part becomes the whole, representing it precisely because of its difference." If you like to think of your poetry in terms of history and politics, this is a pretty good book for you.